To Canaan's Land I'm on My Way

William Matthew Golden, 1918

In celebration of the three-year anniversary of Word & Song on the Fourth of July, we are offering a special on new paid, gift, and upgraded subscriptions.
THS WEEK ONLY

I began this patriotic week with the word nation, so you’d suppose our Hymn of the Week might be a patriotic anthem, such as America’s rousing National Hymn, God of Our Fathers, one of my family’s favorites. In fact, I played it on the piano at the homeschoolers’ graduation ceremony when my son David was one of the graduates. The music is that of a heart-stirring march, and though it doesn’t celebrate the greatness of America, which is of course not the purpose of a prayer, you feel when you sing it that you are standing shoulder to shoulder at Fallen Timbers with Mad Anthony Wayne (my home state Pennsylvania’s favorite son), or in New Orleans with Andrew Jackson, or beside Grant and Lee at Appomattox, when they signed the terms of surrender that ended our most dreadful war.

But now that I say so, maybe you’ll see the reason behind this week’s choice, “To Canaan’s Land I’m on My Way,” also known as "Where the Soul Never Dies," which Debra also wrote about in Sometimes a Song a couple of years ago — wrote about with real personal love. Anyway, none of the four men I’ve named above were saints, and as much as I love my native country, and that particular part of it where I was born and where I spent my boyhood, it cannot satisfy the deep longings of the heart. It is good; it isn’t the ultimate good. The coal-mining lands of Pennsylvania formed many true and stalwart people; but the coal in my county is gone, and the miners have all returned to the dust. We ought to love our earthly homeland, and love it more tenderly and with greater forbearance and forgiveness, because it is not our homeland. Thomas Aquinas said so in one of his celebrated Eucharistic hymns: we give glory to the three Persons in one God, who will give us eternal life “in patria,” in the Father’s land, our true home.

So come with me to Parchman, the hard-labor prison in the delta region of Mississippi. It’s a place with a long and sometimes troubled history — the Freedom Riders were imprisoned there, for example. But back in 1918, that rough place was full of men set to labor at clearing the fertile land and growing and harvesting cotton, with the earnings going into the state coffers. In that prison was the composer of our Hymn of the Week, William Matthew Golden. We don’t know why he was there, but we do know he was serving a term of eight years, and we also know that he composed most of his gospel songs while he was there. There aren’t many details I can find about his life. His plain and modest tombstone in Spring Valley Cemetery, in Mathiston, Mississippi, reads, “Lover and Composer of Gospel Songs.” He died on May 13, 1934, on the way to the hospital after the truck he was riding in crashed with an auto on a Mississippi road. The obituary I’ve found says that he was a “writer of religious songs and revival leader.” That would be after he’d gotten his life back together, about fifteen years after he left Parchman. He was 56, survived by his father and by his wife and five children.

He wasn’t a great poet. He didn’t pretend to be. There’s the charm of most good solid folk music, that it doesn’t suffer under pretensions. Sometimes simplicity is the best. Golden says what he means, straight out. He longs not for Alabama or Tennessee or Louisiana, but Canaan, “where the soul of man never dies.” That’s not the Mississippi we cross, but the Jordan. In that land of Canaan, we believe that all that we knew of the good and true and beautiful, in Pennsylvania or Mississippi, or New South Wales or Calabria or Gloucestershire, will be given back. It will be like nothing we have ever known, but what we have known will have been in some mysterious way a preparation for it; the road to Canaan begins in the land we love.

This is Debra’s pick for today, a beautifully played and yet straightforward rendition of “Where the Soul of Man Never Dies” by Ricky Scaggs and Tony Rice.

To Canaan's land I'm on my way,
Where the soul of man never dies;
My darkest night will turn to day
Where the soul of man never dies.
REFRAIN.  No sad farewells, no tear-dimmed eyes,
Where all is love, and the soul of man never dies.

A rose is blooming there for me
Where the soul of man never dies;
And I will spend eternity
Where the soul of man never dies.  REFRAIN.

A love-light beams across the foam,
Where the soul of man never dies;
It shines to light the shores of home,
Where the soul of man never dies.  REFRAIN.

My life will end in deathless sleep,
Where the soul of man never dies,
And everlasting joys I'll reap
Where the soul of man never dies.  REFRAIN.

I'm on my way to that fair land
Where the soul of man never dies,
Where there will be no parting hand,
Where the soul of man never dies.  REFRAIN. 

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is a reader-supported online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. To receive our new posts, please join us as subscriber. Use one of the green buttons in this post to get our forever-discount rate of 30% off the regular subscription price.

Note: Paid subscribers have unlimited access on demand to our full archive of over 1,000 posts; our most recent posts remain available to all for several weeks after each publication. We think of the Word & Song archive as a little treasure trove, and we hope that our readers will revisit and share our posts with others as we continue our mission of reclaiming — one good thing at a time — the beautiful and the true!